Those Vegetables!

It’s not just animals that we gift or burden with human traits. Artists have also freed vegetables from their roots, allowing them to find both love and jealously human-style. Below are examples from Amédée Varin’s beautiful 1851 edition of L’Empire des légumes. (Click on an image to see a scroll-through slide show.)

Advertisers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often used anthropomorphic vegetables to illustrate seed packets and trading cards. And fruits and vegetables even made their way to the front of Valentine’s Day cards.